Mexico's Election

The Country's Ruling Party Seeks Legitimacy And A Mandate Sunday

Campaign Trail This Year Makes A Chicago Stop

August 19, 1994|By Melita Marie Garza, Tribune Staff Writer.

It could have been a typical presidential campaign event in any Mexican city: A crowd of well-dressed influential people with last names like Moreno, Gonzalez and Velasco dined on filet mignon at a swank hotel as Mexican waiters kept the cabernet sauvignon flowing.

Then-because there really is no such thing as a free lunch-dessert became a cup of fresh fruit washed down with speeches promoting Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Sunday's election.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Aug. 20, 1994:Corrections and clarifications.A graphic Friday on Mexico's election was misleading. The section on largest Mexican populations in U.S. cities should have been clarified by stating that it included all people of Mexican origin, both Mexican and U.S. citizens, living in the U.S. at the time of the 1990 census. The Tribune regrets the error.

But the event wasn't held in a Mexican city. It was held in the Edelweiss Penthouse Suite in Chicago's glass-walled Swissotel.

"It is very important for us to be here in Chicago, the city with the second-largest Mexican population in the United States," said Xavier Rivas, coordinator of Citizens for Zedillo, a Mexican political group. Rivas was referring to the number of Mexican citizens living in Chicago. Overall, when Mexican citizens are combined with Mexican-Americans, Chicago ranks fourth.

Rivas' statement might seem overwrought. Unlike the citizens of some other countries, Mexican nationals living abroad can't vote in their country's elections. So Mexicans and Mexican-Americans here have long been ignored by politicians from their homeland.

But no longer. Finding itself in its most closely watched race in decades, the long-ruling PRI is trying to convince Americans that this election will be on the up-and-up, and is hoping to win votes indirectly.

"Communicate with your relatives and friends in Mexico to support and vote for Zedillo," Roberto de la Madrid, the former governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, exhorted the Chicago audience. "You are important to Mexico. You are our ambassadors in the U.S."

"We are all proud of you, of the way you have placed yourself in the U.S. economy through hard work, contributing through your culture," he said, using fluent English as did the other speakers. "The monies you send are a great help to your relatives and also strengthens the economy of the country."

The PRI's opponents haven't been active in Chicago. A spokesman for Diego Fernandez de Cevallos' conservative National Action Party (PAN) said it planned no U.S. campaigning. The other major opposition party, the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), largely has limited its campaign activity in the U.S. to some speeches by presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

But Mexico and the PRI, under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, has come to view its diaspora across the border as a valuable public relations tool, and as a potential political ally. Instead of characterizing Mexican-Americans and Mexican citizens living in the U.S. as traitors to the homeland-long the tradition-Mexico's government has begun courting them as allies.

Last year, Zedillo, then Mexico's education minister, came to Chicago to donate $1 million in Spanish-language books to the Chicago Public Schools. Later, as the debate over NAFTA heated up, Mexico's development bank set aside $20 million for joint ventures between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Mexico's government even hired Mexican-American firms to lobby for the agreement.

The PRI is favored to win again Sunday, but as Rivas acknowledged, "Mexico is going through changes. The political competition is much harder than before."

So is the international scrutiny. Responding to decades of doubts about the honesty of elections, the Salinas government in 1990 removed control of federal elections from the government's Interior Ministry and created the Federal Electoral Institute. It was established as an independent body, though some question its autonomy.

"Mexico has invested $1 billion in trying to give credibility to the electoral process," said Rivas, holding up his plastic voting card, complete with a picture, fingerprint and magnetized tape on the back.

But the PRI is not just campaigning on behalf of Mexico's national image. Five weeks ago, Citizens for Zedillo joined forces with Hispanics for Zedillo, a group started by Fred Estrada of Miami, the Cuban-American publisher of Hispanic and Vista magazines. The two groups wined and dined Hispanics in fancy hotels in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, at the Albuquerque Country Club and in San Antonio's elite Plaza Club.

Both groups are close-mouthed about the cost of their public relations blitz. Estrada estimated that each luncheon cost him $4,000. Rivas declined to say how much the Mexican Citizens for Zedillo group is spending.

"We are all volunteers," said Rivas, a farmer and businessman from Baja Californa. "We all used our own money to get here."

"We're not here selling the PRI, we are selling Zedillo," said Rivas, who touted the Yale-educated Zedillo's leadership experience as the head of the ministries of education and budget and programming. Just as importantly, he noted that Zedillo is of modest background.

"For the first time we've got someone who really understands the people downstairs," Rivas said.